The Contingency and Eternity of the World from the Perspective of the Shia Traditions (Hadiths)

One of the alleged instances of the incompatibility of reason and religion is the controversial issue of the physical world’s temporal contingency, meaning having a starting point, which philosophers have always tried to deny and theologians have tried to prove. In this dilemma, theologians have even accused some philosophers of blasphemy. The theologians have cited both intellectual and narrative evidence for this claim, but in this study, only the narrations related to this subject-matter have been examined. In this paper, an attempt has been made by using the Shia narrative authorities and categorizing the narrations about the contingency of the world and relying on the frequencies of the narrations based on verbal and intellectual evidence to show that, despite the claim of theologians about the physical world’s temporal contingency based on the appearance of the narrations, with a deeper view and without mental prejudice, we can find that these narrations not only do not indicate this claim, but also, based on the same documents, may even refute this claim, and, in some narrations, we can find the indication of eternity of the world.